"The use of torture is widespread in China and the country's legal system needs a major overhaul for the situation to improve, a top U.N. envoy said on Friday, adding the government had obstructed his investigations.
Manfred Nowak, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, said his team was under frequent surveillance during a two-week trip that included Tibet and the northwestern Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and was granted after 10 years of lobbying by his office.
There was also evidence authorities had intimidated victims and family members the U.N. team tried to interview, he said." [Full Story]
"For the past decade, UNHCR has been issuing Refworld as the most comprehensive, reliable and updated refugee information resource available anywhere. Sometimes referred to as the "Refugee Encyclopaedia", Refworld is a collection of more than 90,000 full-text, searchable documents from UNHCR specialists and information partners around the world." [Read more]
"Sudanese security forces and other armed groups continue to rape and abuse displaced women in Darfur with impunity, according to a U.N. report on sexual violence in the troubled Sudanese province.
Louise Arbour, the United Nations' high commissioner for human rights, wrote that victims are routinely subjected to humiliating treatment at the hands of the authorities if they say they have been raped. Sudanese police frequently fail to register or investigate sex crimes, and courts sometimes try rape victims as adulteresses if they cannot prove they are telling the truth, she wrote.
"Rape and gang rape continue to be perpetrated by armed elements in Darfur, some of whom are members of law enforcement agencies and armed forces, and the government appears either unable or unwilling to hold them accountable," the 29-page report said. "Many women do not report incidents, out of fear of reprisals, and are discouraged from reporting by the lack of redress for sexual violence." [Full Story]
BBC: "A major UN report has called for an immediate end to Zimbabwe's slum clearance programme, declaring it to be in violation of international law.
"The scale of suffering is immense," it said. About 700,000 people have lost their homes or livelihoods and another 2.4 million people have been affected.
Secretary General Kofi Annan said it confirmed "catastrophic injustice" had been done to Zimbabwe's poorest."
"Condemning the recent murder of journalists in Brazil and Haiti, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has yet again stressed that an attack on reporters is an attack on society itself." [More]
"With human rights observance being one of the central goals of the United Nations, Human Rights High Commissioner Louise Arbour today outlined a strategic vision for the future and called for tools to increase her office's global leadership and its engagement with individual countries.
"Our objective must be to help bridge the gap between the lofty rhetoric of human rights in the halls of the United Nations and its sobering realities on the ground," Ms. Arbour says in a report to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who transmitted it to the General Assembly." Read more...
CNN: "The United Nations on Sunday condemned as "utterly unacceptable" the alleged abuse of detainees at the main U.S. base in Afghanistan, and urged the U.S. military to allow a probe by Afghan human rights investigators."
"U.N. human rights monitors are to be deployed next month in northern Uganda to try to stem rights violations linked to the conflict between the government and the Lords' Resistance Army, a U.N. spokesman said on Friday.
Under an agreement being finalised with the government in Kampala, the monitors will also help train local authorities including police, United Nations human rights spokesman Jose Luis Diaz said." Read more...
"The United Nations Commission on Human Rights censured North Korea on Thursday for "widespread and grave violations," including torture, executions and forced abortions.... The resolution, brought by the European Union and Japan, was adopted 30 to 9, with 14 abstentions, including South Korea. The measure expressed deep concern about torture, public executions, arbitrary detention, infanticide, imposition of the death penalty for political reasons, the existence of a "large number of prison camps" and extensive use of forced labor." More